Life After Death

Question: What happens when a god dies? Do they just get sent down to their native Underworld, or do they suffer the cessation of their existence altogether? What happens when the Aesir finally kick the bucket during Ragnorak - do they just not exist anymore?

Nobody ever just winks out of existence in Scion, so everyone can rest a little bit easy on that one. The idea of death simply being the end of existence with no continuation of the soul is a pretty modern one, mostly based on the scientific understanding that consciousness arises from brain function, and would have been confusing and terrifying for most ancient people. Where the idea does exist, it's always an exception and usually as a punishment - for example, souls eaten by Ammit are consigned to the abyss of non-existence, the ultimate punishment for failure to be a righteous person.

The whole point of the underworlds across various mythologies is to explain where people - even gods! - go when they die and what happens to them thereafter. You'll see gods that die and go to the Underworld all the time in ancient mythology; Izanami, who becomes queen of Yomi after her death, or Baldur, who goes immediately to Hel from whence the other Aesir can try to bargain him back home again, or Adonis, who at his death goes home to Hades and his foster-mother Persephone, and so on and so forth. From the prevalence of myths like these, we can probably pretty safely assume that gods who die go to their respective underworlds, where they're officially under the power of the local death god and subject to the usual rules of death unless said death god chooses to make an exception for them. Depending on what was going on when the god died, you could also rule that they might end up in a different underworld than their own; if Baal kills Susanoo in glorious thunder-combat on his home turf in Lebanon, there's a good chance Mot might rise up to claim the Japanese storm god and drag him down to Nepesh, rather than Izanami being able to exert her influence so quickly into foreign territory. Psychopomps make a big difference to where a god goes, as well, so if Hermes is on deck, most people will end up in Hades where they belong, but cultures that don't have a dedicated psychopomp might find that their afterlife disposition is less sure.

Past that point, it's a matter of what other people - death gods, Scions, the pantheons themselves - do that determines if anything else happens. If everybody accepts that that death happened and isn't getting reversed, then that's the way it'll stay, and like Gugalanna in Irkallu that god will probably never leave. If people are severely upset about the situation and manage to get enough of the other gods involved, forays into the underworld to bargain with its gods and try to get the dead deity resurrected might occur, with success varying from none (Baldur) to partial (Adonis) to almost total (Baal). Most gods are subject to the rules of death and probably can't resurrect themselves, though there are a few who do and Scion tends to model them as having Ultimate Stamina (or Circle of Life, for those Fertility gods in the home audience).

All of this is the general way we handle dead gods in Scion, but the Aesir, as usual, are a special case. They're not going to simply blip out of existence when they die at Ragnarok - nothing in the Ragnarok prophecies or the rest of Norse myth suggests that, and it would be a very foreign idea to the ancient Norse people who believed in them - but they're also definitely going to be permanently removed from play to make way for the rise of a new world with a new generation of gods ruling it (led by Baldur - hey, he got resurrected! - and Vidar). Some of this is easily explained away by pointing to Hel, who as the reigning death-goddess would have final say on everything that happened to these people and is unlikely to be favorably inclined toward letting her jailers go free again. Freya might technically also have a say, but since she goes totally unmentioned in the stories of Ragnarok, what she's doing at this time is a mystery and she may have gone home to Vanaheim with her father Njord, and furthermore she probably has no interest in rescuing the Aesir that have held her family hostage for centuries. But even if you decide that recalcitrant death goddesses are the major block preventing the Norse gods from hitting the streets again, what about people like Thor and Odin, who have Ultimate Stamina and should be able to just get right back up on their own?

We've talked about this a bit before, and it remains true: they can't do that, and the reason is because Fate wants them dead. This isn't a random death that they can shrug off; it's the prophesied doom that has been foretold to destroy them forever and ever, amen. Fate will simply ensure that they do not and cannot live again, which Storytellers can interpret any number of ways - their Ultimate Stamina just doesn't work, or Fate throws so much stuff at them that it ensures they spend too much Legend and can't afford it anyway, or their souls are immediately bound by the strands of Fate so that they can't live again, whatever floats your boat. Unlike gods who die on their own terms, the Aesir are fated to be destroyed, which is what makes them so desperate and terrified about the whole ordeal. Fate is the only thing more powerful than they are; they know they're not coming back from this.

That doesn't mean that there's no chance your PCs might be able to change some of that with their actions, of course. Scion's all about children of the gods fighting or aiding Fate and helping their parents in their greatest struggles, and in addition the Ragnarok prophecies are sometimes vague and could mean a lot of different things, not all of which include "death" in the strictest classical sense. But that's all up to an individual game's players and Storyteller to determine, and I doubt anyone's Ragnarok is ever going to be identical to anyone else's.

Incidentally, when we ran Ragnarok, those who were killed in the great battle actually did not go to any underworld and were instead directly absorbed by Muspelheim, which was at the time rampaging and consuming everything in its path. This made them pretty much permanently and irretrievably gone in most cases, not only beyond the reach of normal gods but that of death gods, too. A god dying within a Titanrealm might have nasty effects on his or her soul, and without a psychopomp to get them out of there they might find that they never make it to an underworld at all.

It is technically possible in Scion, by the way, for a death god or Death-aligned Scion to actually destroy a dead soul completely by means of tearing it apart with Mother's Touch, but the system fails to give exact mechanics for things like how much "damage" an incorporeal soul can take and what happens to it when it "dies", so Storytellers will need to wing that one when it comes up. We suggest using the W+I+L resistance roll the creature would have had in life to determine its hardiness as a spirit, since its physical stamina no longer has any bearing on things, and would like to remind everyone that those with Harmony (or, depending on the situation, Conviction, Order or Valor) are probably going to go batshit insane if you start doing something as counter to the natural order of the universe as permanently eradicating souls.